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Chris Chen

About me

Hi! 👋

I've been building software as a profession since 2009 - back-end servers, web front-end, mobile apps, you name it! What happened before 2009 was my previous professional life, mostly with SAP, an ERP company. I have worked with enterprises, startups, agencies, and consultancies. I even tried launching my startup twice, both failed. Got good stories from those crazy startup days though.

My go-to programming language is Javascript/Typescript, been a happy user since 2016. Depending on projects and teams, I also use Go (also a happy user) and Python. I coded with Objective-C/Swift and Java/Kotlin during my mobile app years. I've been living and breathing with AWS since 2019.

In terms of system architecture, I've done Monolith and got burned when business growth outpaced engineering velocity. Microservices seems a no-brainer to me nowadays, but it comes at a cost too. Serverless vs Container? I'm leaning towards the former, but the market voted the other way after Kubernetes had won the Cloud Native battle. Again, it depends on the project and team skill-sets.


Enough about boring technical monologue.

🦘 I live in Melbourne, Australia, with my wife, a 11yo son, and a 7yo daughter (this year they call themselves 7-Eleven). We moved here from Shanghai beginning of 2013. Winter is long and wet here, Summer short but sweet. There is no Spring or Autumn.

🏃🏻‍♂️ I love running and other endurance sports. I've finished 4 marathons, 1 trail ultramarathon, 2 sprint-distance triathlons, and 2 Olympic-distance triathlons. Sadly afer 2 years of pandemic and inactivity, I found a 10km jog is a challenge these days.

🎸 I picked up playing acoustic guitar in 2019 when I turned 40. My flavour is fingerstyle rather than strumming chords.